I’m currently on a flight home after attending SCALE 10x, which seemed like an opportune time to reflect on the event. SCALE was once again an amazing event. Kudos go out to Ilan, Gareth, Phil and the entire SCALE team; the tracks were excellent, the event well managed and well attended (I don’t know if official numbers are out, but I believe they fell *just* short of their goal of 2,000 attendees) and the social scene was as vibrant as ever. SCALE really is the bar by which local community events should be measured.

While I didn’t live blog the event this year, as I have in the past, I did live tweet it. Visit the @linuxquestions twitter account if you’re interested. Some general thoughts after attending SCALE.

* Open Source and Open Standards, as they pertain to the cloud, are going to be huge and hotly debated topics in 2012; and likely well beyond. There seems to be a feeling that this is something huge that’s still just in its infancy, and that makes the topic interesting and exciting.
* Big data and distributed filesystems also appear to be heading for widespread mainstream adoption in the near future. On that note, LQ is considering moving away from OCFS2 as part of our next infrastructure update. If there’s anyone with GlusterFS experience in a production web environment, we’d be interested in hearing from you. We’d also be interested in other solutions you feel may be well suited.
* The MySQL ecosystem is not only thriving, but wildly more diverse than when it was just MySQL AB.
* Very small but very powerful devices such as the Raspberry Pi and the Pandaboard are not only remarkable, but should open the door to a whole new class of devices and possibilities. The amount of innovation here should be awesome.
* DevOps has really matured at an impressive rate.

I look forward to attending SCALE 11x, which will be my 8th, next year.